Practising Realism

October 1, 2025 · sound , theory , book , sonic-realism

The final chapter of Sound Encounters, moving from theory to practice. This chapter explores what it means to practice sonic realism - to compose, record, and listen in ways that honor sound's autonomy and vibrational reality, rather than reducing it to perception or meaning.

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To theorise sonic realism is to affirm sound’s capacity to exceed, withdraw, resonate. But theory alone does not suffice. Sonic realism is not just an ontological claim – it is a practice. A way of listening, making, and relating. A stance. A poetics. What might it mean to compose as a sonic realist? To curate, to record, to walk, to mix, to refuse? These questions do not seek prescriptions. Sonic realism offers no unified method – only a set of invitations. Practices that honour sound’s autonomy. Techniques that stay close to its vibrations, its delays, its refusals to resolve.

One such invitation is restraint. To hold back. To not fill every silence with signal or narrative. Alvin Lucier’s I Am Sitting in a Room does this by doing almost nothing – repeating a voice until it dissolves into the resonant frequencies of the space.¹ What remains is not speech, but resonance. The architecture speaking through feedback. A sonic object shaped by its own medium.

Another is attention. Deep listening, as Pauline Oliveros conceived it, requires us to be present with all that is sounding – not just what we prefer, but what persists.² The room tone. The hum. The outside. In this, sonic realism becomes a kind of ethical attunement. Not to capture sound, but to be with it. To allow it to arrive as it is.

A third is exposure. Christina Kubisch’s Electrical Walks invite listeners to move through the electromagnetic city with induction headphones, revealing the inaudible buzz of infrastructure.³ Here, sonic realism reveals itself as disclosure – not of meaning, but of presence. An ontological lifting of veils.

Other practices invert this. To make a sound not heard. To withhold. Raven Chacon’s installations often gesture toward violence and erasure without declaring themselves fully.⁴ A refusal to resolve into audibility. This too is sonic realism in practice: to acknowledge that some sonic objects are deliberately absent, withdrawn by their makers, or occluded by systems of trauma, of harm.

To practise realism, then, is not to chase fidelity or truth. It is to work with sound as matter, as force, as neighbour. It is to engage the sonic field without assuming mastery. To resist symbolic capture. To treat listening as a form of co-presence – to what is heard, but also to what remains unsounded.

For artists, this might mean composing with feedback systems rather than fixed notes. For curators, it might mean allowing installations to be incomplete, reactive, open. For listeners, it might mean walking without headphones. Listening not for content, but for objects, for encounter.

In each case, sonic realism unfolds as a practical metaphysics. A way of attending to what vibrates without asking it to explain itself. A discipline of letting sound be.

Notes

Lucier, A. (1969 to 1970) I Am Sitting in a Room [composition], recorded on I Am Sitting in a Room [album]. Lovely Music, 1981.
Oliveros, P. (2005) Deep Listening: A Composer’s Sound Practice. New York, iUniverse.
Kubisch, C. (2007) ‘Electrical Walks, 2004 to present’, in C. Cox and D. Warner, eds, Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music. New York, Continuum, pp. 355 to 359.
Chacon, R. (2018) American Ledger No. 1 [composition], performance notes; and Three Songs, exhibition, Whitney Biennial, 2022.